Week 18 Blog
The Tempest
William Shakespeare
Act V Scene 1 pages 127 - 127
Words - 657
Summary - Ariel ends up asking about how the king and his band of peers are coming along in the journey across the sea. The king finds out that Ariel and the rest of his friends are in jail, because Prospero demanded they be kept in some sort of cave. Everybody is constantly in raged and very afraid. Ariel is sent to go tell the others that they are now being freed and great Prospero decides that he won’t use any more wizardry. Prospero eventually will use magic again for the last time and he will have the crew destroy his encyclopedia of spells so he cannot use it anymore. Prospero casted a dark spell onto Ariel and the others to make them not move in a formation of Prospero’s choice and not question anything. They are told by Prospero that Gonzalo is very noble for being true to Prospero and that he admires everybody else for their cooperation. Prospero tells Ariel to make his way to where he is being held and gets his old outfit he wore as Milan’s once duke. Prospero then puts on the threads and lets the whole enslaved group go to do as they please and live the rest of their lives onward after he tells his personal servant to get the mariners and boatswains out of the ship wreck.
Analysis – Being very close to the end of the play and being able to read so much of this without doing any blog posts has given an advantage at actually understanding a tough piece of Shakespearean literature. The feeling this play gives me is one of people following their morals and eventually feeing empathetic and doing the correct thing in the end. They realize that they are not the only people in the world and start to notice that they are the smaller piece of a bigger picture. They discover this through self deprecation for example Ariel says “Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling of their afflictions, and shall not myself, one of their kind, they relish all as sharply”. He means that he feels his biggest issues and his biggest conflicts are no match for others and he should feel sorry for others situations rather than worry about his own. Prospero stated once “Leave it alone, thou fool. It is but trash”. He is telling Gonzalo that his encyclopedia of spells is nothing to get excited over or be jealous of because compared to others encyclopedias is just “trash” in his eyes.
Personal response – Due to all of the snow days and get out of blog free cards this is my only blog post for this play and probably my last due to the book ending very shortly. Because of this I have been able to absorb the dialect and actually form quality opinions on this play. My opinion is that it is very Shakespeare esque and I was expecting it to be just like all of his other plays. One difference this had from others was that there hasn’t been a real “tragic” ending yet. What I mean by that is all of the characters’ end up helping each other out and are on the same page and I think that’s due to the real tragic things happening in the beginning of the play. I enjoyed writing this blog post because it’s the first one I have been able to write in a while and I missed being able to let all of the feelings I have about a good story much like this one onto a page and think about what’s coming next. I’m predicting a sudden ending where all the characters make realizations about what to do with the rest of their lives after they have seen the luxurious good life and even crossed the bad enslaved part as well.
